In the future we won't get fat

At the same that we're turning our health care over to bureaucrats in Washington, our scientists are offering a glimpse of the future of medicine. The future is not anything we know now in our so-called "healthcare system," which was not designed as a system and doesn't work as a system. And it's certainly not anything like what Mr. Obama imagines.

In their book Transcend, Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, MD, write:

"We have exactly doubled the amount of the genetic data collected each year since 1990, and this pace has continued since the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003. The cost of sequencing a base pair of DNA - the building blocks of our genes - has dropped by half each year from $10 per base pair in 1990 to a small fraction of a penny today. Deciphering the first human genome cost a billion dollars. Today, anyone can have it done for $350,000. But, in case that's still out of your budget, just be patient for a little while longer. We are now only a few years away from a $1,000 human genome. Almost every other aspect of our ability to understand biology in information terms is similarly doubling every year.

  

"Our genes are essentially little software programs, and they evolved when conditions were very different than they are today. Take, for example, the fat insulin receptor gene, which essentially says 'hold on to every calorie because the next hunting season may not work out so well.' That gene made a lot of sense tens of thousands of years ago, at a time when food was almost always in short supply and there were no refrigerators. In those days, famines were common and starvation was a real possibility, so it was a good idea to store as many as possible of the calories you could find in your body's fat cells.

"Today, the fat insulin receptor gene underlies an epidemic of weight prob­lems, with two of three American adults now overweight and one in three obese. What would happen if we suddenly turned off this gene in the fat cells? Scientists actually performed this experiment on mice at the Joslin Diabetes Center. The animals whose fat insulin receptor gene was turned off ate as much as they wanted yet remained slim. And it wasn't an unhealthy slimness. They didn't get diabetes or heart disease, and they lived and remained healthy about 20 percent longer than the control mice, which still had their fat insulin receptor gene working. The experimental mice experienced the health benefits of caloric restriction - the only laboratory-proven method of life extension - while doing just the opposite and eating as much as they wanted. Several pharmaceutical companies are now rushing to bring these concepts to the human market."  

Learning how exercise works

Exercise protects against a host of illnesses, from heart attacks and dementia to diabetes and infection. How it does so, however, remains surprisingly mysterious. But a paper just published by Beth Levine of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre and her colleagues sheds some light on the matter.

Dr. Levine and her team were testing a theory that exercise works its magic, at least in part, by promoting autophagy. This process, whose name is derived from the Greek for “self-eating”, is a mechanism by which surplus, worn-out or malformed proteins and other cellular components are broken up for scrap and recycled.

Dr. Levine reckons that manipulating autophagy may offer a new approach to treating diabetes. And their research is also suggestive in other ways. 

Autophagy is a hot topic in medicine, as biologists have come to realise that it helps protect the body from all kinds of ailments. 

Autophagy is an ancient mechanism, shared by all eukaryotic organisms (those which, unlike bacteria, keep their DNA in a membrane-bound nucleus within their cells). It probably arose as an adaptation to scarcity of nutrients. Critters that can recycle parts of themselves for fuel are better able to cope with lean times than those that cannot. But over the past couple of decades, autophagy has also been shown to be involved in things as diverse as fighting bacterial infections and slowing the onset of neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases.

Most intriguingly of all, it seems that it can slow the process of ageing. Biologists have known for decades that feeding animals near-starvation diets can boost their lifespans dramatically.

A few anti-ageing zealots already subsist on near-starvation diets, but Dr Levine’s results suggest a similar effect might be gained in a much more agreeable way, via vigorous exercise. The team’s next step is to test whether boosted autophagy can indeed explain the life-extending effects of exercise. That will take a while. Even in animals as short-lived as mice, she points out, studying ageing is a long-winded process. 

But she is sufficiently confident about the outcome that she has, in the meantime, bought herself a treadmill.

Sit down and exercise

The Harvard Medical School makes strength training easy. You just need a chair.

Chair stand

Exercises the muscles of the abdomen, hips, front thighs, and buttocks



Place a small pillow at the back of your chair and position the chair so that the back of it is resting against a wall. Sit at the front of the chair, knees bent, feet flat on the floor and slightly apart. Lean back on the pillow in a half-reclining position with your arms crossed and your hands on your shoulders. Keeping your back and shoulders straight, raise your upper body forward until you are sitting upright. Stand up slowly, using your hands as little as possible. Slowly sit back down. Aim for eight to 12 repetitions. Rest and repeat the set.

Seated bridge

Exercises the muscles of the back thighs, back, and buttocks


Sit slightly forward in a chair with your hands on the armrests. Your feet should be flat on the floor and slightly apart, and your upper body should be upright (don’t lean forward). Using your arms for balance only, slowly raise your buttocks off the chair until you are nearly standing, with your knees bent. Pause. Slowly sit back down. Aim for eight to 12 repetitions. Rest and repeat the set.

Triceps dip

Exercises the muscles of the back upper arms, chest, and shoulders



Put a chair with armrests up against a wall. Sit in the chair and put your feet together flat on the floor. Lean forward a bit while keeping your shoulders and back straight. Bend your elbows and place your hands on the armrests of the chair, so they are in line with your torso. Pressing downward on your hands, try to lift yourself up a few inches by straightening out your arms. Raise your upper body and thighs, but keep your feet in contact with the floor. Pause. Slowly release until you’re sitting back down again. Aim for eight to 12 repetitions. Rest and repeat the set.

More exercises at the link.

Eat right, think right

Gonna flunk the SAT.

A new study goes deeper in understanding the connection between good nutrition and a healthy brain.

The researchers found some striking connections between nutrition and brain health. People who had higher levels of B family vitamins, as well as vitamins C, D, and E had higher scores on cognitive tests than people with lower levels. The same positive relationship was found for omega-3 fatty acids, which have previously been linked to better brain health. 

On the flipside, people with higher levels of trans fats in their blood had poorer performance in thinking and memory tests. Their MRI scans also revealed more brain shrinkage than people who had lower trans fats levels. Trans fats are found in a variety of junk foods, like fried, packaged, and fast foods.

Eat a lot of green things.

The single best thing for your health

(American Digest)

A little health secret: gratitude

I always thought this was a bit corny, but having an "attitude of gratitude" is very real.

Gratitude has recently become the favorite feast of psychologists studying the consequences of giving thanks. Cultivating an “attitude of gratitude” has been linked to better health, sounder sleep, less anxiety and depression, higher long-term satisfaction with life and kinder behavior toward others, including romantic partners. A new study shows that feeling grateful makes people less likely to turn aggressive when provoked.

How do you get started? One suggestion: start with “gratitude lite.” 

That’s the term used by Robert A. Emmons, of the University of California, Davis, for the technique used in his pioneering experiments he conducted along with Michael E. McCullough of the University of Miami. They instructed people to keep a journal listing five things for which they felt grateful, like a friend’s generosity, something they’d learned, a sunset they’d enjoyed. 

The gratitude journal was brief — just one sentence for each of the five things — and done only once a week, but after two months there were significant effects. Compared with a control group, the people keeping the gratitude journal were more optimistic and felt happier. They reported fewer physical problems and spent more time working out. 

Further benefits were observed in a study of polio survivors and other people with neuromuscular problems. The ones who kept a gratitude journal reported feeling happier and more optimistic than those in a control group, and these reports were corroborated by observations from their spouses. These grateful people also fell asleep more quickly at night, slept longer and woke up feeling more refreshed. 

“If you want to sleep more soundly, count blessings, not sheep,” Dr. Emmons advises in “Thanks!” his book on gratitude research.

I'm going to give this a try. I'm grateful that I came across this article.

Throw grandma under the bus

I often write about breakthroughs in medical research. Innovation is the only way out of our healthcare mess: new discoveries in the lab and new ways of getting them to people.

Unfortunately, the new bureaucracies rising up under Obamacare are going to hurt this.

Benjamin Zycher, a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, writes:

Obamacare established the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute to “conduct research to provide information about the best available evidence to help patients and their health care providers make more informed decisions.” What could be wrong with that? CER is supposed to be “a rigorous evaluation of the impact of different options that are available for treating a given medical condition for a particular set of patients.” 

Alas, there is a problem: The federal government does not have patients. Instead, it has interest groups engaged in a long twilight struggle over shares of the federal budget pie. Less for one group means more for others, and even modest reductions in the huge federal health-care budget are a tempting goal for other constituencies.

In other words, there can be no such thing as unpoliticized science in the Beltway, he writes. 

It is inevitable that political pressures will lead policymakers to use the findings yielded by CER analyses to influence decisions on coverage, reimbursement, or incentives within Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal health programs.

Consider the new environment confronting would-be investors in new and improved medical technologies, examples of which are pharmaceuticals and medical devices and equipment. One cannot know in advance either how CER analyses of interest will turn out or how the findings will be used. Indeed, the uncertainties are enormous.

This is staggering:

Recent research from the Pacific Research Institute examined the likely effects of these CER implications for R&D investment in new and improved pharmaceuticals and devices and equipment. Using data from the National Science Foundation and other sources, R&D investment would be reduced by about $10 billion per year over the period 2014 through 2025, or about 10-12 percent. Based upon the scholarly literature on the benefits of medical innovation, this reduction in the advance of medical technology would impose an expected loss of about 5 million life-years annually, with a conservative economic value of $500 billion, an amount substantially greater than the entire U.S. market for pharmaceuticals and devices and equipment.

This adverse effect would be concentrated upon technological advances likely to serve the needs of smaller subgroups within the overall patient population, upon riskier investments among new treatments, and upon drugs and equipment expected to prove relatively less profitable.

Well, if people die the cost of their healthcare drops to zero. So there's a solution.